I feel safer

A government scientist cleaning out an old storage room at a research center near Washington made a startling discovery last week — decades-old vials of smallpox packed away and forgotten in a cardboard box.

It’s not the beginning of an apocalyptic novel, it’s just life. There was probably some old guy, ten years after retiring, sitting on the lake, fishing, “Maybe I should have mentioned I left the smallpox in that storage closet when I retired. Oh well.” On the other hand, security through obscurity.

Peter Marks, deputy director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Research and Evaluation, said the discovery was unexpected but not a total shock. He added, however, that “no one’s denying we should have done a better job cleaning out what was there.”